Re: Why this fascination with terminal applications?

I enjoy the irony of several posts in this thread nothing that it would be a waste of money to buy a fancy computer and run "1970s" programs on it ... and so they intentionally use bloated software to justify the money they spent.

What horrific logic. The premise is sound, sure: it is a waste of money. Just spend $40 on ebay to get a perfectly good computer that would do anything/everything you'd need, and then you don't need to use crappy bloated software just to justify spending thousands of dollars on a computer and you don't need to spend thousands of dollars on a computer. Win win.

Re: Why this fascination with terminal applications?

BTW, I use terminal emulator on my Android phone for some simple operations -- like moving files and unzip / extract tar files. These things become boring with GUI file explorer apps. Terminal with just busybox on android (that is very low level of configurability) still provides lot of options, regular expression support etc.. Also, Aria2c android binary for any downloading -- that is fab.

Re: Why this fascination with terminal applications?

Trilby wrote:

I enjoy the irony of several posts in this thread nothing that it would be a waste of money to buy a fancy computer and run "1970s" programs on it ... and so they intentionally use bloated software to justify the money they spent.

What horrific logic. The premise is sound, sure: it is a waste of money. Just spend $40 on ebay to get a perfectly good computer that would do anything/everything you'd need, and then you don't need to use crappy bloated software just to justify spending thousands of dollars on a computer and you don't need to spend thousands of dollars on a computer. Win win.

Yeah. Using supercomputers for editing HTML is seen as glory. But we exist.

Re: Why this fascination with terminal applications?

My reasons for CLI applications: 1) It's fairly easy to get a common color scheme for everything (I use zenburn)2) It's possible to get vim-like bindings in everything (Vim, ranger, mutt etc)3) Same font in every program4) Using only keyboard is more efficient than constantly switching between keyboard action and mouse action5) Performance. No CPU/GPU cycles are wasted drawing fancy borders, shadows and the like

Points 1-3 are pretty hard to get with GUI apps - many opt for some non-standard menus, buttons and other eye candy shenanigans. Also GTK and Qt apps look different (maybe this is not the case in Gnome or something, but Gnome/KDE are way too bloated for my taste).

Re: Why this fascination with terminal applications?

Point 4 above is one of the big ones for me, especially now that so many developers have bought into a mentality of flashy distractors, pop-ups, moving widgets. When I have to use a mac at work I feel like I'm playing a game of whack-a-mole every time I want to search my email: I have to first click in the search bar, but as my mouse moves towards the search bar something else pops up in the same area and I need to move my mouse away for that to hide, then I need to try again to get into the precise area of the search bar that will let me click the search bar without clicking something else. Then I start typing my search term and a drop-down is prepopulated as I'm typing; I see the matching item I want and I need to move the mouse to click on it, but by the time the mouse gets there, the background search process updated the results and now the result I wanted to click moved, and it moved so far down the list that I have to type more ... so back to trying to click on the search bar.

On my arch machine, I just type "mgrep <searchterm>" and I get the results.

This is just one representative example of almost every time I need to use a mouse. If you are in the office next to me, you would know exactly when I grab a mouse as it is invariably followed by me shouting a couple times "damnit, stop moving". GUIs* have somehow convinced people that it's ok to make us jump through hoops and work for what we want our computer to do rather than making our computer work for what we want to do.

* note: to be fair, these are bad GUIs, but at present there is no other kind.

Re: Why this fascination with terminal applications?

It is kind of like universal desktop manager - you can count on CLI app to work wherever there is a character output (which is pretty much everywhere).

It works equally well on local and remote machines, text and graphical consoles, desktop / server / mobile. You always know what to expect.

Adding a feature to CLI app is just as easy as adding a new command line argument - a universal UI.

CLI apps are easily automated, just pipe in the input and scrape / analyze the output - it is all text. You can automate remote, remote into remote, remote into remote into remote, etc... Possibilities are endless

Overall consistency. You know what to expect from CLI app and it doesn't matter where you run it and how. Yes, the learning curve is steeper, but once you're comfortable - the benefits that come with it are substantial

Many things that people do on computers, except content consumption, don't actually need a GUI. So much investment into pretty buttons when all you need is something like "pacman -Syu" now and then.

That said I am not a CLI purist. I know and embrace the need for the GUIs, but the closest universal GUI that we came up with is HTML which in turn can be accessed from console (except images and videos, of course). Go figure.

Re: Why this fascination with terminal applications?

Hey there,

for me, it just "happened". I've alredy been using Vim fo some years and it just integrates so well with the other cli apps. Also, i can use half of my RAM for ramdisks und so on.last time I checked, google-chrome is the last GUI application I'm using (needed for work, private I browse using surf and tabbed).

Re: Why this fascination with terminal applications?

For me these are the encouraging factors:First and most important one is that using command line keeps you safe from lots of bug related inabilities, for instance if you use ranger as a file manager and then you suddenly lose X for some reason, you have no problem. Just Open a tty and proceed with your work.Another factor is personal preference i think, i like how text based applications look (though i am probably biased a bit by some fictional hacker picture that movies put in our minds). Another look feature is that the color scheme is constant, you set it once and it affects all you apps.Scalability is yet another cool thing i can refer to, like if you have a 4k screen on a tiny laptop you still got the things you need in a zoom level that wouldn't make you go -_- with your eyes.You can use them while SSHing into your machine from the other side of the world!!! or just school or work. (without having to forward X).Something else that makes me happy is how you can find your way in terminal, like the first time i learned to work with networkmanager's command line utility (nmcli). it's lovely to learn commands just by appending a --help to a specific part of it and you get the options (instead of searching through menu bars and stuff).

Last edited by m47h4r (2018-10-02 12:03:44)

There is no dark side of the moon really, matter of fact, it's all dark.

Re: Why this fascination with terminal applications?

It's interesting that this thread is still ongoing after nearly a decade.

There will always be people in the world who are mystified by the command line. So be it. To those people, I never recommend Arch Linux, or other distros that aspire to similar spirit, such as Void or Gentoo.

If you want to spend the rest of your life passively partaking of consumer-friendly apps, please, go ahead and knock yourself out. There is a lot out there for you. Not just the obvious candidates like Windows or Macs, but also Ubuntu or Mint. Please, take your fill. Take your fill of all that sugary goodness.

Come back when you've had enough of all that.

People who not only use but prefer the command line will still be here waiting for you.

Not just a year from now.Not just five years from now.Not just a hundred years from now.

Computation will always require people who can look deeper and think about what substrate is required to support your pretty little "apps".

Re: Why this fascination with terminal applications?

I love the CLI but for things that really matter to me, that is why most of my dev environment is CLI only except for emacs which makes good use of X11 (to display PDFs and such). But for other activities (watching movies, listening to music, word processor, printing) I like to have pretty GUIs . It also doesn't bother me to use the mouse since I learned the hard way that too many keybindings can be bad for my hands.